The Other Side
Mrs. Adeyemi still lived in the same bungalow, though "lived" was perhaps too generous a word for what she did inside those walls. She existed. She persisted. She occupied space that developers had offered to buy seventeen times, each offer larger than the last, each refusal more bewildering to the men in suits who could not understand why an old woman would choose a crumbling house over a cheque with six zeros. When Ngozi knocked, Mrs. Adeyemi opened the door as if she had been expecting her for all fourteen years.
"So you came back," she said, and it was not a question but a verdict. She served Ngozi warm Fanta in a glass cup and told her about the neighbors who had sold — the Okonkwos, the Babangidas, the family whose name she could no longer remember because memory, like a neighborhood, can only hold so many departures before it starts to blur. The construction noise was constant now, she said. It began at dawn and ended only when the generators ran out of diesel, and even then the silence was not silence but a held breath before the next assault.
Ngozi recorded everything, but she knew she would never use the tape. Some stories are not meant for British broadsheets with their careful word counts and editorial distance. Some stories are indictments, and the accused cannot also be the prosecutor. She closed her notebook, turned off her recorder, and asked Mrs. Adeyemi if